Numbers 
 
I woke up, and the number nine was green. That really pissed me off, as the New York skies were fragrant with fish wafting over pine trees. Presently, I dipped into the ocean and washed myself of all my transgressions before repudiating the number nine, which rusted right before my eyes. If only numbers knew how much the soil needs them to stay put, and not wander off with crayons in the night. 
 
**

Echo Echo 
 
I am an echo of my shadow. I am empty of time. I walk through mazes of darkness, blindfolded. I howl into a hollow mirror. I am a voiceless void.
 
**
 
Dialects of Clocks 
 
He swallows a clock and exhales an eternity of ashes. The world burns and she gulps gasoline to quench the fire. His thirst rusts his throat and he thaws into a sculpture of the sea. 
 
She merges with the mountains and spits scripts of sand.
 
**

Sète
 
The wind sliced the day in two. One half was ocean; the other half was sky. The sun refused to take sides and dripped its yolk into the sea; setting the sky aflame, it extinguished itself, and the world was black, and windless. 
 
**
 
Mirror Mirror 
 
The mirror multiplies the labyrinths of time into infinities of oblivion multiplies the mirrors of time into labyrinths of infinity multiplies the mirrors of oblivion into a time of labyrinths 
 
**
​
I Spy Eyes 
 
The spy eyes what lies beyond the eyes. But the eyes spy the spy’s lies. The lies lie beyond the spy’s eyes. The spy’s eyes lie. ​

**

Clockwise Cat publisher and editor Alison Ross pioneered the genre and tenets of Zen-Surrealism, and uses those as her guiding aesthetic. She has published poetry in journals such as Chiron Review, Otoliths, Maintenant, and First Literary Review - East. She also writes reviews for PopMatters. Clockwise Cat is thrilled to announce a new focus on prose poetry, so please do take a gander and submit your creations.

 
Manifesting 

After I anesthetized my robot manifestation coach, I took the dream elevator up to the top floor of the basement. Have you spent weeks, or even years, of your life wondering why theme parks are so remorseless? I even bought two front row seats on the Devil’s Details roller coaster, just to see if Satan has an innie or an outie belly button. While not a complete catastrophe, that nearly ruined my fiscal quarter. Even when dressed in my regulation summer pastels and cartoon dress shoes, I can’t help but wonder if I’m quite the Don Juan I like to think I am?  So, after I got home, I immediately enrolled in a top-flight—although low-cost—flirting class at Madame Tussaud’s drive-thru Museum of the World’s Best Osculators. You’ve got to be sure to flirt just the right way. Of course, a better life is possible, but only if you’re unconscious. Flight attendants: prepare for arrival. 

**   

Relief Jester

While styling around town in my multi-coloured clown costume, I fell into a polarizing force field. I don’t think it was just a publicity stunt, because the sticker shock nearly electrocuted me. Of course, my zesty neo-lumberjack outfit would have looked better on a real model, but I was elected by secret ballot. I’m a man of the people, so, out of the gooeyness of my heart and the promise of a 79% pay raise, I agreed to play the part—at least until a relief jester could be located.  Big mistake. 

**

Who Could Ask for More?

Like medieval combat in the antique future, I’m doing all the right things, wrongly. Fortunately, thanks to the canned laughter and fast-frozen giggles, I’m living the Dreamsicle, but just to be on the safe side, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the giraffes for being so tall and the sharks for keeping their distance. I may be approaching the 11th hour, but I’m looking forward to getting a leg up on the competition. After four marriages, and two divorces, I’m confident that I’m starting to get the hang of it. In fact, soon I’ll be able to decapitate the hidden hierarchy without so much as popping a single bubble on the bubble wrap. Of course, one day, everyone will inevitably lose everything, but like the executioner’s reply to his job-satisfaction survey, who could ask for more.

**

Shoulder Season

It’s shoulder season, so I need to sharpen the blades on my backyard Guillotine. The best defense is an extremely succinct offense. It’s an uphill battle, but luckily, it’s the greatest thing in the world for your brain. Also, it looks impressive on your resume. Of course, there’s only so much a sentient being can be expected to withstand. Here’s a list of some of the recent winners. No, I don’t speak French, but I have a beautiful Parisian accent. In fact, I’ve been training my hair to look the part—you know, existentially New Wave. When you do it yourself, you never know for sure what you’re going to get, but I like to leave the door open. Besides, no one knows where the bodies are buried.

**

My Cabinet of Mysterious Oddities

Do they make streets where the houses are, or build houses where the streets are? Personally, I’m opposed to any opposition that opposes me, but my effortless savoir faire usually saves the day. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask the mustachioed concierge for the key to my little pied-à-terre and a couple of hundred thousand francs in unmarked bills. He’s a real gentleman. Of course, I wouldn’t be in this desperate situation if it weren’t for the untimely discovery of the burning skeletons and the smoking gun. Thank goodness I was wearing my survival socks. At least the murder trial has been postponed. 

Come over here. I want to show you something.

**

Safety First

One of my favourite authors is Dr. Wow. I guess that’s no big surprise. I especially love how he writes just like everybody else. Suitable for any occasion. Needless to say, it’s always the dead of night in outer space. Fortunately, I’m on a secret mission. Although I’m not a liberty to say, I can tell you that my advanced prankster class instructor says I’m having the wrong kind of fun. If I was more coordinated, I’d enroll in a synchronized swimming class. There’s no limit to what you can do when you’re wearing hydraulic water wings and matching alligator flippers. Of course, there’s a boatload of things that can kill you. In fact, one of these days I’m going to get exactly what I deserve. Until then, you don’t mind holding this thing, do you? No, I guarantee it’s not loaded. 

**
​
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of eight collections of poetry and flash fiction: Or Words to that Effect, I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly, WordInEdgeWise, Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in: 45th Parallel, Baltimore Review, New York Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Puerto del Sol, Clockhouse, Folio, Best Microfiction (2019), Action Spectacle, The Los Angeles Times, Hunger Mountain, Right Hand Pointing, and other journals and anthologies. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com Selected audio readings: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1
 

​
Guillotine Girl
 
after Shivani Mehta
 
wants to smile more. She wants to wear a different gown, a brighter perfume, less like the scent of endings. God will make her different the next time around, but she must make the most of her oblique life, of her innate ability to kiss bodies goodbye. She is well-versed in the tenderness of necks, like a mother who has memorized the veins, and folds, and hinges of the pearled bones of her newborn. She most likes to rest in the first light of sunrise and reflect on her tailored potential. She doesn’t always think of herself as a threat or a warning, although she understands the worth of having those qualities hidden under her petticoat. In this life, Guillotine Girl asks forgiveness for how men use her. In another version of her body, she shaves men’s facial hair so close, their cheeks gleam like a baby’s bottom. She dreams of a life with a musical score that doesn’t end with a thud. 

**
 
The Devil, the Dahlias, and The Baby
 
I ran into the devil at the flower shop. I was picking up a bouquet for my friend who just gave birth to a baby boy. The devil was deeply sniffing each bunch of flowers like it was his last hurrah. “Hey, funny seeing you here,” I said. He appeared hurt or offended, like he didn’t deserve beauty. His cheeks looked like fireball candies that everyone would like to lick. “Doesn’t everyone deserve the smell of beginnings?” He asked. “I thought you’d be smelling those in the cemetery, if anything,” I scoffed. “Even flowers get sad,” he said. “And the ones at the cemetery smell like tears,” he said. “I’ve got enough sadness.” “Oh, I had no idea that everything depends on context, even when it comes to flowers,” I said. “They smell like the awful tears-sobby, salty ones.” He dropped his head. “Want to help me pick a bouquet?” I asked to mend my offense. The devil’s eyes brightened like imploding planets. “I’d love to.” He smiled a toothy smile that was both enchanting and more magnetic because he was filled with hope. “These are the first flowers that the baby will ever smell,” I said. “The flowers can’t wait,” he said, and his eyes grew glossy, but he held back the tears so the flowers wouldn’t catch his perpetual gloom. He led me to the Dahlia’s. “My treat,” he said. They were the color of fresh blood. For a fleeting second, there was no death, only the smell of new babies, and the type of blossoms that unravel sadness.
 
**
 
The Invisible Horses

The invisible horses arrived when we ran out of food. My father said, “The moon ate it all, just look how fat he is.” The invisible horses ran through the house and knocked over every ugly, naked baby sculpture my mother had collected at yard sales. There is no way to be sad when you have a stable of invisible horses. Sometimes their stable is the empty fridge, and the invisible horses shrink and whinny in the fluorescent light. We eat hay together in the night hours when the crickets don’t know how beautiful their legs are. The invisible horses tell me I am a constellation, and that is why I am so frail. Tomorrow, there may be milk the color of the Camarillo horse. I will wish on the falling stars of my body for chocolate the color of the Paso Fino. The myth of the invisible horses is about outrunning hunger.
 
**

Acting Drunk
 
When I was sober, when I wanted to talk like an intrigued sense of starlight to strangers, when the strippers sliding through the strobes didn’t butter me bothered, when I sat like a wife, like a wide-legged unbothered man, when I cowboyed, when I sank into the blur like a barrel slug, I pretended I was drink, pretending I was drunk, when I floated new I remembered my first tethering, when I swung umbilical, when I shamed my mother and disappeared into her hope, when I slung myself over my own shoulder and sloppily made love to my wasted flesh, when I was a hungover art film I always watched the first half second, drunk-slept the second half first. I woke up, I tell you, but sometimes I pretend I’m drunk, a new kind, where you cry to fill the dried rivers, and wake up like a Macy’s day parade, where you blister under a fiery ghost of beginning, the kind of drunk where every season you’ve been waiting for finally sings your name.
 
**
 
The Suicide Expert

No one wanted to hang out with the suicide expert. His conversations began as weather forecasts and ended in tutorials on knots. I’m not saying I don’t respect the expertise. I’m saying all the darkness has a brick-feel, and I’m going for wing-feel these days. He is a “special kind of church of individual empowerment,” he says. I want instead to know about waking up from hypnosis, about jumping from optical illusions, about being doubly inside and outside the thing. He listens well about my expertise of birds and the quality of feathers and bones, light and brittle. There can be flight in fragility. We go on a date at one of those places where you dine in the dark. They call it the “blindfolded restaurant experience.” We understand the facial structures of each other over charcuterie and touch. I didn’t love him, but I love his longing for the idea of being lost. We were two wings from the same macaw.

**
 
My Ex-Boyfriend’s Memory is a Broken Mirror

I fall off a truck bed every time he dreams of me. I can tell because the bruises look the same-like overgrown plums that stain your hands with psychotherapy ink blotches meant to unveil your daddy issues. My dead father is knocking on the door of this poem now, and he says he’s all better now. I will be too. I interrupt this previously scheduled broadcast for a crying fit without the glory of baptismal tears. The disease of love will wear you shatter-sharp. If a man slaps your mosquito bites so hard it starts a wildfire, for better or worse, he must be sacrificed to the wolves. I hold vigil for the charred life swallowed up by my desire. I disappear into the gift of my ex-boyfriend’s violent smoke blur. I am the blood-red aftermath horizon. Yes, it’s like that when you are born again. I’m hanging up now.

**

This poem first appeared in Anacapa Review, 2024.

**

Pumpkin Soup with Van Gogh

I whispered in the ear he eventually cut off. Van Gogh was nothing like the books say. He had this ravenous style of eating. “Slophouse,” he called it. “I like gravy and sauce because it reminds me of paint,” he said. At brunch the hollandaise looks like a dash of buttery sunrise on his upper lip. I told him Everlee was no good for him. She was rumored as a ruiner; dead-crow in-a-dream-like, but who really listens to a bearded lady. I do embrace my lot of hair prickling from my chin down round my turkey neck. Beauty is in the eyes. I thought Van Gogh loved me because he would often startle me alive from behind corners or in dark rooms. “You could be brilliantly present,” he said.  Van Gogh liked sex limericks, so I memorized a few for our date, but he ended up crying into his pumpkin soup and leaving me high and dry to pay the tab. I drank his soup riddled with his salty tears. I still remember the used pillowcase smell of his frazzled hair and the moonlit taste of his sadness.

**

This poem was first published in Sho Journal, 2024. 

**

Marilyn Monroe Wants to Listen to the Birds

Marilyn Monroe was pacing the rockery. I was glad she wasn’t in the iconic white dress because I’d have to find wind. I was dressed like a messy bed, and my phone was thankfully dead, or I’d otherwise be obligated to my persona, consumerism, and dressing up some Insta- reel. I wanted to touch her hair, but you can’t go around giving your hands this type of permission. “I’m paving a walkway,” I said. “You?” “Patio,” she said. “I want a clear path to heaven,” I said. “I want a place to sit and listen to the birds,” she said. “I read they only sing when there are no predators around,” I said. “I’m lonely,” she said. The rain came on quickly, then like a miracle, and we aimed for a thicket like birds do. Her mascara was running, and my wings were wet. Rain makes it all right to cry. We both felt like singing in the pitter-patter.

**

This was first published in Sho Journal, 2024.

**

Peace Be With You, Pee-wee Herman 

I put it in reverse and become a cartoon. I can be smashed and exploded and spring back to life anew. It was a hoot, but then, the cops arrested me for stealing, which I’d only stole my own body. It was mine after all, but they gave me a felony, and I had to be housed with a clown who cried nonstop because his mother never brought the cake make-up she’d promised. I read to find a way home and I regret to say the Bible didn’t get me there. I wanted it, the liberation. Please don’t jump on your white horse and hang me. We are all acting our way toward wholeness. I found the neck tattoos had repaired me well to move through the gates, and I could again be propelled from oven to table. In Peewee Herman’s Big Holiday, they asked him at dinner to say a word, and he said, Encyclopedia, Pimple, and Hairball. Pray for the holy ability to find your own cherry red convertible to draw you toward your supreme sherbet-coloured sunset.

**

This poem first appeared in The Tiny Journal, 2024.

**

Bad Mothering Starts with Sugar and Ends with Salt

Don’t get therapy, so you can be a carnival of repeated mistakes. Keep winning the goldfish that will die in a week and don’t teach the children about prayer or proper burial. Grow yourself a cinderblock fence around your heart, the kind that encircled your house on the westside where your mother lived between the ink blotches in books, afraid of who would break in this time. Bad mothering begins with sugar and ends with salt, and don’t forget the food, so fast the children are transported angrily into adolescence. Provide the right malnutrition. Famish them. Tell them rich lies for dinner. You should be drunk too- on whatever makes you blind. Don’t ever listen, not to their heartbeats or tears, or wonderings, and god forbid you keep the lie of magic alive. Get them walking quickly, send them out the door into the wastelands. Deadbolt their dreams. Talk about orphans and war, and how many monsters the darkness holds. Remind them how much beasts drool. Never, never let them sleep in your bed because they sleep like sweet-smelling starfish, like big cracker crumbs. Leave a packed bag for them by the door so they never have peace.

**

This poem first appeared in The Tiny Journal, 2024.
 
**
​
Amanda Chiado is a writer, poet, teacher, and arts advocate. She holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, California College of the Arts, and Grand Canyon University. Amanda won the Press 53 Poetry Award 2026 for her prose poetry collection Today I Wear the Bear Head, and is the author of the chapbook Prime Cuts (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her poetry and fiction have been published in DMQ Review, The Account, Southeast Review, RHINO, and others. She lives and works in Hollister, California.

Murmuration, a Triptych
 
I.
 
Starlings waltz above the trees in the county park. Turkey vultures tango on an abandoned chimney cap. Cardinals cha-cha on a red maple branch. A year ago, I could not open my eyes. A year ago, I could not leave my house. A year ago, I could not lift my legs. Now my maskless breath reaches out in open air, flutters feathers in a roar all my own.
 
II. 
 
She writhes in and out of consciousness. We’ve just been told her kidneys and liver are shutting down. More antibiotics. Stat. She’s in the ICU now, where they brought her when she arrived by ambulance, her blood pressure 84/42. But she will need to go into the OR later, to have a stent put in place to drain her bile duct where an infection has built up. She doesn’t know. She cries out for our dead mother. I want to take her hand the way I did when she caught her leg in a bicycle wheel. I was in high school and she was just entering kindergarten. I held her head in my lap across the bathroom counter as the doctor stitched up her knee. I want to take her hand, but I’m not wearing gloves and she’s immunocompromised by another disease she’s grappling with. Her son, her only child, came to New Brunswick from Long Island. I told him on the phone he’d better, because we don’t know if she’s going to make it. I’ve only been in the hospital to give birth. She, my baby sister, has had meningitis, all kinds of orthopedic surgeries, cancer surgery, and now this. She’ll pull through, because she always does. Because she refuses to accept the bad stuff. She mobilizes in a crisis like when our mother’s house was burgled. She came right away and kept us all sane. Like when our middle sister’s husband dropped dead during dinner at Applebee’s and she dropped everything, bought a cheesecake, and came to the hospital. Stayed with our sister for days. Wrote and delivered the eulogy the way she did for both our parents. And now here she is, under the white sheets, mumbling in Yiddish to speak to our dead mother. I want to hold her hand, but I don’t have her strength.
 
III. 
 
Waiting for Donna after I sent my son home, because he was retching from his worry about my cancer and the surgery, because I couldn’t hold him in my arms the way I did when he was little and kiss his burning keppy and made him tea with six packets of sugar, because the doctors wouldn’t tell him about my condition although he was chronologically old enough to hear, because he couldn’t handle his mommy being sick, and so I waited for Donna to come and get me, the way I waited for her a couple of years before when EMTs rushed me from my cubicle to Overlook because I couldn’t catch my breath and they thought it was a heart attack, but I knew it wasn’t, it was a gastro thing I didn’t learn about for several more years, my gall bladder not able to handle the fat in the gravy that accompanied my lunch, and I waited for Donna, who showed up at the hospital with a turkey wing in case I was hungry and she wrapped it in a surgical glove, and I had to laugh, because Donna could always make me laugh, and when Donna brought me home after cancer surgery, and my family handed me the bill for the kosher deli they brought in at my request, I wasn’t laughing anymore. 
 
**
 
Cross-Stitching
 
Fingers threading a needle, needle puncturing fabric, embellishing a canvas or stitching a seam. It’s all about self-expression through artistry of the hands with a needle. Sewing, crocheting, knitting, embroidery. And passing down the artifacts: a cross-stitched tablecloth, a knitted afghan, handmade Barbie clothes with miniature fur collars. When I began sewing in eighth grade, I did not know I came from seamstress grandmothers, a tailor great-grandfather. My ancestors have fused themselves into my skin-seams.
 
**
 
Luxury on the Half Shell
 
after Dream of Luxury, by Dorothea Tanning (USA) 1944
 
Crack open the natural oyster of your dreams. There inside the shimmering closet are rows of coveted handbags. Rare pearls to drape over your shoulder, hold in your hand. Caress each one, close your eyes as you finger the leather of Hermes, Chanel, Gucci, Leiber, Coblentz & Koret. You may be barren in the desert of materialism, but you can dream of ovaries of ownership. These gems rise from the shell like a Venus chorus. And there, in the sand, an unopened oyster. You fence it for your footwear fantasies.
 
**
 
I Will Make a Way in the Wilderness
 
after Survivor, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1938
 
I live in immuno-isolation, out here alone to wander and wonder. I wrap myself in plastic bubbles, wear a protective collar. No one can see my plumes. I stomp the ground until my feet grow numb. My discoveries go unshared. My illness and treatment have framed me tiny.  My frame is golden with embellishments in every corner. I glow survival.
 
**

The New Yoga Pose
 
after Woman with Egg, by Leonora Carrington (UK/Mexico) 1960
 
Ascend to the heavens, where you can kneel, rest, give gratitude for climbing the iron rails. The egg remains unbroken, the egg of rebirth, the egg of nirvana perfection. Joining you is the resting place of those who came before you, those who breathed life into the heavens, into the pantheon of gods who paved your way, gave you the dove-led path along which the egg glided. The archway is everything, no in, no out, just through, artifacts resting on the shelves like canned preserves, keeping myths alive for posterity. You are the bird who has found its rightful nest, black and white among the blue and white, your head-egg tethered to the heavens, your body in servitude. 
 
**
 
The Genus of Georgia
 
after Inside Red Canna, by Georgia O’Keeffe (US) 1919
 
Yayoi Kusama hides within the deep, dark polka dot of Georgia’s fierce protection, cradled by the curves that layer her fortress. Frida Kahlo grasps the edges and slides along Georgia’s waves. She cannot make it to the other side without an extra push. Georgia brushes her upward, lifts her into accomplishment. Inside Georgia’s red canna lily lays the stamen of friendship, the petals of patronage in the genus of generosity.
 
**
 
The Tuskegee Man
 
Like me, he walks through Colonial Park every day. I imagine his story. This tall gentleman is a World War II veteran. His posture tells me he was and is a disciplined military man. He wills himself into the daily routine of this walk, noting how important it is to keep up one’s strength, endurance, and health. He was a Tuskegee man, not a native to New Jersey. Flew with the best of them, because they were the best. That’s why he strides with a puffed chest. I watch him every day, impressed with his commitment. But one day, he sits on a wooden bench, just staring at the mockingbirds flying between the oak and elm trees. His coat is open. He still wears his CWA cap, which I know to be the Communications Workers of America, a union of the telecommunications industry, once so prevalent in New Jersey. He has done his time. He deserves his rest. As I pass him, I tip my own cap and say “Hello.” He does the same. 
 
**

V for Victory
 
They crowd themselves into the crux of the V for victory. It will take all of them working together—the veterans, the flyers, the navy, the marines, the infantry, the scientists, reporters, and filmmakers—to fight against the sheets of prejudice and hatred. Liberty is on their side as are FDR’s Four Freedoms—freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of worship. They come from all nationalities in solidarity, hammering their stake into victory.
 
**
 
Twisted Jazz
 
We, the Mad Hatter Musicians, find our groove in Central Park, our tenor and bass sax and bass dangling. We’re not into violins. We bend our bodies to the improv notes, limbering up those limbs we’ll entangle barefooted on the dotted Twister canvas on the knoll. A crowd gathers to watch us wrangle, hear us syncopate. Some sit, some kneel. Another pushes a dollar bill into the bell of my sax, mangling the sound. We play a bit, lay down our instruments and spin the wheel to play. Our legs take odd angles, our hands tangle. We laugh until we pick up our instruments and let the notes jangle all through the night.
 
**
 
Barbara Krasner is addicted to the prose poetry form. She is the author of seven poetry collections, and her poetry has been featured in more than seventy literary journals, earning her multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominations. She lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com